This 30 minute Healthy Chicken Stir Fry is a great way to get in a ton of veggies into a weeknight supper. Serve it over top of brown rice for tons of fiber!

There are nearly 500 (!) recipes on this website. I’ve been cooking things, taking pictures, and posting recipes on the internet for all to see for almost six years now. And yet, somehow, I still don’t have all of my go-to, staple, can-always-count-on-it recipes posted.

Walk into my kitchen on any given weeknight and guess what you’d probably find me making? This Healthy Chicken Stir Fry. Even though it’s a staple in our house, it has somehow escaped the viewfinder of the blog up until now. That changes today.

The interesting thing about this dish is it’s exactly the kind of thing I never would have eaten a few years ago. Two common flavorings in stir fry—soy sauce and ginger—are not my most favorite of flavors. People are always shocked when I tell them that!

But I’ve made a lot of progress over the past few years. I actually like ginger now (in small doses), and I can tolerate soy sauce when it’s a base flavor in a sauce or marinade. You still won’t find me dousing my rice in soy sauce anytime soon, but I’m proud of my palate for evolving! And it’s evolved right into loving this simple, healthy, weeknight stir fry. I love this quick dinner!

One of the biggest hurdles I think people have when they first start eating more healthfully is the increased time commitment for food prep. I can’t deny it. Cooking healthy, fresh, whole foods requires more prep time than hitting up a drive through or baking a frozen pizza.

But, just because you want to eat healthier doesn’t mean you have to suddenly commit to cooking for three hours every day after work (you can if you like and it makes you happy, but you don’t have to). There are tons of healthy recipes out there that are almost as fast as fast food. I’m a big believer in doing what you can with what you have when you have it. And if you have only a half hour to cook meal for your family on a busy Tuesday evening, buckle down and figure out how you can make the best of those 30 minutes!

When thinking about how to compress cooking a healthy meal into a time crunch, I’m a fan of using wholesome products that save you some precious minutes without sacrificing any nutrition. Minute® Brown Rice is a great example of one of these products! It’s nutritionally the same as the long-cook brown rice you can get in the grocery store, but because it is parboiled, it cooks in a flash. Normal brown rice can take upwards of 40 minutes to cook, but Minute Brown Rice is ready in 1/4 of that time! It’s a great pantry staple to have in your kitchen for crazy weeknight dinners.

This stir fry recipe is infinitely adaptable (just like all stir fry recipes). I love this combo of veggies, but if you don’t like mushrooms, leave them out. Want to use shrimp instead of chicken? Go for it. Want to make it meatless? Rock on. Want to make it gluten-free? Use tamari instead of soy sauce. Want to save even more time? Use a bag of frozen stir-fry veggies. Make this your own! Enjoy.

Healthy Chicken Stir Fry

Description

This 30 minute Healthy Chicken Stir Fry is a great way to get in a ton of veggies into a weeknight supper. Serve it over top of brown rice for tons of fiber!

Ingredients

For the Marinade

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon honey

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 pound chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces

For the Stir Fry

2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

3 cloves garlic, minced

3 large carrots, peeled and julienned

1 large red bell pepper, julienned

1 large yellow bell pepper, julienned

1 cup snow peas, sliced into 1” pieces

8 ounces button mushrooms, sliced thinly

2 cups frozen broccoli, defrosted

1 tablespoons cornstarch or arrowroot powder

4 cups cooked brown rice

Sliced green onions and toasted sesame seeds, for serving

Instructions

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, lemon juice, honey, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, and red pepper flakes. Add in the chicken, and toss to coat. Let marinate in the fridge will you chop your veggies.

When you have all your veggies ready to go, heat a large wok over high heat. Add one tablespoon of the olive oil.

Drain the chicken from the marinade, reserving it. Add the chicken to the wok and cook until the chicken is cooked through, about five minutes. Remove the chicken to a plate.

Add the remaining olive oil to the wok, and then add in the garlic. Cook for a minute or until fragrant. Add in the carrots, bell peppers, snow peas, and mushrooms. Cook until bright in color and just crisp cooked, about three minutes.

Add in the broccoli and cooked chicken. Reduce heat to low.

Whisk the cornstarch into the reserved marinade, and then pour into the wok. Bring to a simmer and cook until thick, about five minutes. Serve on top of Minute Brown Rice and topped with green onions and toasted sesame seeds.

I like making a knock off pad thai with zucchini “zoodles,” extra veggies, and a peanut/soy sauce for a quick, week night meal. We don’t eat a ton of meat (we were vegetarian for 10 years), so I’m not used to cooking meat…but I thought you were supposed to discard marinades after using them on raw meat?

I’ve heard some people do, but I actually asked this question in my food safety class back during my stint in culinary school, and just as long as the marinade gets brought up to the same temperature as you would the meat, they said it was fine.

One of my favorite quick weeknight dinner is Budget Byte’s Dragon Noodles: http://www.budgetbytes.com/2012/08/spicy-noodles/ It doesn’t have many veggies built in, but you can add in tons, and in appropriate portions, straight noodles with a yummy sauce and an egg is a perfectly healthy dinner! And it’s done in less than 15 minutes!

Put on some rice or quinoa to cook. Sauté onions until soft and then add kale and some water to steam. Blend up a tahini+lemon juice+soy sauce+sirracha sauce and serve with crunchy sunflower seeds. So tasty, healthy, and fast!

My favorite quick and healthy meal to prepare on a weekday would be grilled lemon chicken with a big salad full of romaine, tomatoes, red onion, cucumbers, celery, jarred roasted bell peppers, avocado, and hemp seeds! I like to add a light rice vinegar salad dressing and pair it with a big glass of savingon blanc or Pinot Gris : )

I don’t post nutritional information, but there are lots of great calculators out there than can help you figure it out (and be more accurate than what I would provide, because you can input your exact ingredients). This one is one of my favorites because it is as simple as copy and paste: http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

Favorite go-to quickie meal would have to be some kind of grain/veggie bowl – brown rice or quinoa or whole grain bread as a base, bunch of veggies (cooked or raw) piled on next, and a couple of poached eggs and a dash of salt/pepper/olive oil on top. Easy is good. Sooooo good.

One of our favorite quick and healthy weeknight meals is boneless chicken with veggies all baked together on a sheet pan. And it’s easy to change up the flavors by using different veggies, herbs, and flavorings.

We aren’t rushed that often simply because I do prepare food in advance, especially during baseball season. My boys are on different teams that practice at different times on opposite sides of the earth! And this year my oldest son has added Track to the mix! A healthy simple meal that we do make is stir-fry, especially in the summer when the garden vegetables are plentiful. It’s a great meal that gives the kids fuel to continue to go, go, go!

From a food safety standpoint, it’s really not advisable to reuse meat marinades. It’s getting cooked still in this recipe, but it’s rather dangerous to pour raw chicken bacteria back into cooked food in case it is not cooked long enough again. In future recipes, I would highly suggest not doing this!!

I did the recipe without marinating the chicken, and it was still very nice.

Prep is NOT 15 minutes!! It took about an hour to prep all the veggies involved. No doubt once everything is prepped the meal comes together in no time. Grossed out by the raw chicken marinade being used as the sauce later. Worth it to make a separate sauce from what the chicken soaks in. Overall did love the amount of fresh veggies in the dish but did not like eating an hour late. Consider skipping the prep and going with a ready made bag of stir fry veggies.

If I feel like a quick “sometimes” dinner, it’s got to be my creamy garlic prawns with rice. It takes about 4 minutes to go from wok to fork and about the same time to polish it off. Chuck in some crusty bread and I’m in heaven!

All I have made in my life is eggs with toast, rice, and naans lol tomorrow is my first time cooking a proper meal since I got banned from the kitchen (8 years). I google a healthy stir fry recipe and clicked on this one…..wish me luck. *finger crossed* that I don’t blow up my apartment and that I cook an edible one. 🙂

This was sooo good! Such a nice blend of flavors! I am kind of weird about re-using the marinade so I made a little extra. The dish was a little spicy for me but not for anyone else that tried it. I was wondering if the extra marinade should have less of the red pepper flakes??? I am not a cook….sooo Definitely will be having this again!!

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Hello, Friends!

My name is Cassie, and I want to help you eat better. I believe eating whole foods can change your life (it did mine), and I believe you can do it without losing your mind, going broke, or eating like a bird.

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